Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tratyn Runewind" data-source="post: 1112683" data-attributes="member: 685">Hi again, Man, it must be cool to be able to read minds.  Sure you don't have a little Auspex yourself?  A movie company rips off from the same literary sources that a game company does, takes Goth-flavored words that have been in the dictionary for centuries as its terms, and because the game company used the some of the same non-copyrighted words with the same meanings in similar ways in its rip-offs, the movie producers are suddenly a devious crew of IP pirates?  "Childe" in particular is right out of Lord Byron, patron saint of Goth hipster arrogance, but Heaven forbid you use it anywhere near a vampire, or the lawyers will come a-knocking.  Now, some of the plot points being similar is indeed not a coincidence.  Perhaps Baz Luhrmann, Leonardo di Caprio, and Clare Danes should be suing Sony as well...Incidentally, the first decadent, aristocratic, highly organized clan of vampires I ever saw in an RPG was the House of Igorov, in Glantri.  They kept their vampirism secret but regularly used their vampiric powers to interfere in mortal politics and carry on depraved affairs with members of other noble houses.  They were also considered oppressive among non-noble vampires, leading to conflict and rebellion, because their prince ruthlessly forbade the uncontrolled spreading of vampirism in order to keep his own profile low.  Among Igorov's political enemies was Malachie du Marais, a werewolf noble (known as "the White Wolf"!) who led an underground faction of that agitated for equal rights for lycanthropes.  GAZ3, The Principalities of Glantri, was published in 1987 (drawing on material, including Malachie, from Module X2, which was out even earlier), and I'm pretty sure V:TM wasn't out before about 1990, give or take a year or two.  Given that WW "obviously" ripped off their very name from TSR, how much $$$ do you think WW owes them?You're not a professional movie maker or critic (so far as you've revealed, anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />), so I would hardly expect you to have seen every old horror film that has helped form the modern conception of the vampire.  But Captain Kronos, while not a big-studio American blockbuster, is one of the last of the famous Hammer Films horror releases, and is considered by many to be one of their best.  Hammer is the British studio that made Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee famous.  Incidentally, the circumstances of the film itself sound like something that might come out of a quirky RPG campaign, as the main character is an itinerant European swashbuckler of the post-Napoleonic era, wielding a katana (!?).  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />And no, I don't believe the vampire subtypes were called "clans", nor were they as a group aristocratic or Gothy (though individuals were), nor did they represent RPG character class archetypes.  But they did have varying powers (the ones being hunted in the movie drained life force and youth, rather than drinking blood - an obvious IP theft from D&D!) and varying weaknesses (there's a humorous scene with the leads trying various traditional methods to destroy one unfortunate vampire).  That seems closer than Underworld's "clans" come to those of WW, if the legal rigamarole can be believed.  Nicely put, Umbran, though at times I'd consider ignorance of WW and its products to be more blessing than stupidity.  WW's own free borrowing habits, and their laughable list of "evidence", inclines me to the latter theory.  Yes, it was a worthy follow-on to one of the best comedies of the '80s - most episodes I've seen were, alas, better than Ghostbusters II.  Any series that can produce an episode like <a href="http://www.mindspring.com/~michaelreaves/callpreface.htm" target="_blank">"Collect Call of Cthulhu"</a> has got to get some props from me!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Yeah, the abominations are superhumanly strong and can be grotesquely ugly.  A clear infringement on Marvel Comics copyright!  At least as good a claim as some of the other stuff on that list...By the way, Villano, your name sounds kinda DC Comics-like.  Perhaps I'm noticing this because Amazo, Despero, and Eclipso came out in the last DC HeroClix set.  But you might want to keep a weather eye open for the lawyers yourself...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification